Day in Engineering History Archive - October 27

Day in Engineering History October 27 Archive - RF CafeOctober 27

KDKA Assigned Its Call Letters - RF Cafe1675: French mathematician Gilles de Roberval, who invented the Roberval balance weighing scale, died. 1811: Isaac Singer, inventor of the continuous-stitch sewing machine, was born. 1873: Farmer Joseph Glidden applied for a patent on barbed wire. 1904: New York City Subway opened with 9.1 miles of track running from City Hall to 145th Street. 1920: Pittsburgh radio station KDKA received its broadcast license & call letters. 1927: The first newsreel featuring sound was released in New York. 1938: Du Pont announced "nylon" as the name for its new synthetic yarn. 1961: The first Saturn I heavy launch vehicle made an unmanned test launch. 1997: Dow Jones Industrial Average crashed a record 554 points to 7161. 2004: A total lunar eclipse occurred. 2005: IBM's Blue Gene/L system set a new world computing record of 280.6 teraflops.

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Note: These historical tidbits have been collected from various sources, mostly on the Internet. As detailed in this article, there is a lot of wrong information that is repeated hundreds of times because most websites do not validate with authoritative sources. On RF Cafe, events with hyperlinks have been verified. Many years ago, I began commemorating the birthdays of notable people and events with special RF Cafe logos. Where available, I like to use images from postage stamps from the country where the person or event occurred. Images used in the logos are often from open source websites like Wikipedia, and are specifically credited with a hyperlink back to the source where possible. Fair Use laws permit small samples of copyrighted content.